Extreme Fabulations

by Steven Shaviro

  Extreme Fabulations

  Extreme Fabulations

  Science Fictions of Life

  Steven Shaviro

  Copyright © 2021 Goldsmiths Press

  First published in 2021 by Goldsmiths Press

  Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross

  London SE14 6NW

  Printed and bound by Versa Press

  Distribution by the MIT Press

  Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

  Copyright © 2021 Steven Shaviro

  The right of Steven Shaviro to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and review and certain non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-912685-88-2 (hbk)

  ISBN 978-1-912685-87-5 (ebk)

  www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press

  d_r0

  For Adah and Roxanne, as always.

  And in memory of Leo Daugherty and of Joseph Libertson.

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The New Reality

  Chapter 2: The Thing Itself

  Chapter 3: Shadow Show

  Chapter 4: Dr. Franklin’s Island

  Chapter 5: Message in a Bottle

  Chapter 6: Dark Eden

  Chapter 7: Splendor and Misery

  Chapter 8: Proof of Concept

  Works Cited

  Index

  Preface

  This book was mostly written between 2017 and 2019, though some of the books I write about here were previously (and sketchily) discussed on my blog, The Pinocchio Theory. Versions of several chapters were presented as talks at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, the Science Fiction Research Association annual conferences, and the “Speculative Thinking in Literature and Philosophy” workshop at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

  Writing is a solitary endeavor, but it could not take place without a wide network of support. I would like especially to thank Roddey Reid, who gave me valuable feedback on the entire manuscript. Carol Vernallis also read and commented on many of these chapters. In addition, I am thankful for the encouragement and support I have received from many scholars in the science fiction research community. This is a connection that dates back some 45 years, to the time when I avidly discussed matters science fictional in graduate school with Carl Freedman, John Rieder, and Christopher Kendrick. More recently, I have benefited from scholarly exchanges with Mark Bould, Sherryl Vint, Rhys Williams, and many others. Outside of science fiction, Armen Avanessian provided support, as well as occasions for me to present my work.

  I would also like to thank the science fiction writers themselves, whose works have been the occasions for my commentaries. Gilles Deleuze once said: “my ideal, when I write about an author, would be to write nothing that could cause him sadness, or if he is dead, that might make him weep in his grave.” I have always tried to adhere to this standard, though of course it is not for me to say whether or not I have succeeded.

  Thanks are also due to the band clipping., who graciously gave me permission to quote from the lyrics to their album Splendor and Misery.

  I would also like to give recognition to my favorite cafe, Avalon International Breads in midtown Detroit, where large portions of this book were written.

  This book has a double dedication. I would like to recall two great spirits, recently passed, whom I have long regarded as mentors: Leo Daugherty (died 2015) and Joseph Libertson (died 2020). But also, as always, this book is dedicated to my daughters, Adah and Roxanne, in the hope that the future world in which they outlive me will be a better place than our current one.

  Introduction

  This book is a thought experiment. It discusses a number of science fiction narratives: three novels, one novella, three short stories, and one musical concept album. The works in question date from 1950 to 2017. Each chapter stands on its own as an exercise in close and careful reading. But together, in sequence, these eight analyses pursue a single line of thought. Extreme Fabulations is concerned with life and embodiment. I start with questions of what Kant called the “conditions of possibility” for life and thought to be able to exist at all, and for human beings to confront the rest of the universe (Chapters 1 and 2). I then consider questions of how we understand life pragmatically, and how we may thereby imagine controlling and changing it (Chapters 3 and 4). From there, I move on to ask questions about the aesthetic and social dimensions of human existence, in relation to the nonhuman (Chapters 5 and 6). And finally, I grapple with questions about the ethical value of human life under conditions of extreme oppression and devastation (Chapters 7 and 8).

  I pursue these questions neither philosophically nor scientifically, but through the medium of science fiction. I believe that science fiction writing, at its best, offers us a unique way of grappling with issues that deeply and unavoidably concern us, but that are intractable to rational argumentation or to empirical verification. This is not to deny the importance of abstract reasoning and of quantitative research, but merely to acknowledge, as John Maynard Keynes put it, that much of the time “we simply do not know” what is going to happen. The future is not closed. In a casino, we can mathematically assign probabilities to every possible outcome arising from the spin of a roulette wheel, or the shuffling of a pack of cards. High finance attempts to apply this casino logic to everything in the world. But as Keynes argued long ago, such an endeavor cannot succeed. For in the broader world, there is no such thing as a finite set of all possible outcomes, on the basis of which we could assign them relative probabilities.

  Science fiction, despite what is sometimes said about it, does not really claim to predict the future. It is neither prophetic nor probabilistic. It is true that science fiction – like what the business world calls “strategic foresight” – extrapolates from actually existing trends and tendencies, and imagines what might happen in the future if they were to continue. It is also true that science fiction texts – like derivatives and other arcane financial instruments – speculate upon the contingent outcomes of uncontrolled and even unknowable processes. But beyond both of these, science fiction crucially involves a movement of fabulation. The future is unavoidably vague and multifarious; it stubbornly resists our efforts to know it in advance, let alone to guide it or circumscribe it. But science fiction takes up this very vagueness and indeterminacy, by rendering it into the form of a self-consciously fictional narrative. It gives us characters who experience the vagaries of unforeseeable change.

  In other words, science fictional fabulation concretizes futurity as such, with its social, technological, and ontological indeterminacy intact. In this way, it does something similar to what Claude Lévi-Strauss defines as the function of myth: which is “to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)” (Lévi-Strauss 1963). But Lévi-Strauss sees myths as synchronic structures, existing all at once, suspended in the eternal present of a given society. In contrast, narratives are in their very nature diachr
onic or temporal – or better, historical. Science fictional fabulation deals in futurity, rather than being set in the eternal present of myth. In this way, science fiction is counterfactual, or (to alter this too-familiar word) counter-actual: it offers us a provisional and impossible resolution, suspended in potentiality, of dilemmas and difficulties that are, themselves, all too real.

  Henri Bergson, who introduced the notion of fabulation into philosophy, defines it as “a counterfeit of experience,” or a “a systematically false experience,” that nonetheless has considerable value, precisely because of the way that “it can thwart our judgment and reason.” Fabulation emerges in conditions of emergency; it works to preserve us from the dangers of excessive certainty, or of “pushing too far” with our rationalizations (Bergson 1935). In its vital urgency, science fiction exemplifies Alfred North Whitehead’s maxim that “in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true” (Whitehead 1978).

  Insofar as it is a “counterfeit of experience” that suspends our usual assumptions and trains of thought, science fictional fabulation demands to be taken literally. That is to say, any successful work of science fiction produces a powerful reality-effect. We cannot take its descriptions only as allegories or metaphors. We also need to accept them as factual conditions that have unavoidably been given to us, at least within the frame of the narrative. By speaking of givenness, I am trying to suggest that – in the world of a science fictional work – these conditions both overtly display to us their contingency or arbitrariness, and yet at the same time stare us directly in the face with their ineluctable actuality.

  In this book, I try to take the science fiction narratives that I examine as literally, and as fully, as possible. Of course such an endeavor can never entirely succeed. Any text, and any commentary, is unavoidably riddled with all sorts of unwanted distortions and presuppositions. Nonetheless, I hope that I have succeeded in tracing a meaningful trajectory through these eight works of extreme fabulation. Chapter 1 discusses “The New Reality,” by Charles Harness, a short story that takes Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as its novum, or science fictional premise. This forces us to question the extent to which the real, external world can in fact be correlated with, or made to conform to, the all-too-human assumptions with which we approach it. Chapter 2, on Adam Roberts’ novel The Thing Itself, continues this line of Kantian questioning, asking what it might mean to imagine stepping outside the anthropocentric framework. This leads to doubts both about how we understand life, and about what we might imagine as the lifeless void. Chapter 3, on Clifford Simak’s short story “Shadow Show,” follows on to look at changing conceptualizations of life, both in science fiction and in actual biological practice. Chapter 4, with its discussion of Ann Halam’s young adult novel Dr. Franklin’s Island, extends these considerations in order to focus both on the scientific power to control life, and on the degree to which vital processes themselves may resist or push back against such control. Chapter 5 discusses Nalo Hopkinson’s short story “Message in a Bottle” in order to look at the ways that life is manifested in the potentialities and limitations of artistic creation. The chapter, following the story, touches on questions of both biological and social reproduction, and of our ability to confront the open future. Chapter 6, on Chris Beckett’s novel Dark Eden, moves these questions about vitality, reproduction, and futurity from an aesthetic register to an anthropological one. The last two chapters then work through all the concerns of the earlier sections in the context of our all-too-vivid experiences of social, economic, and political oppression. Chapter 7 looks at Splendor and Misery, a concept album by the experimental hip hop group clipping. Chapter 8 considers Gwyneth Jones’ novella Proof of Concept. Both of these chapters raise the prospect of abolition or extinction: a flight into the unknown as an ethico-political alternative to the catastrophes inflicted by an unjust social order. This returns us to the cosmic perspective of the opening chapters, with their endeavors to come to terms with a universe not to the measure of human prejudices and desires.

  Chapter 1

  The New Reality

  Charles L. Harness’ 1950 short story “The New Reality” (Harness 1950) is about a scientific experiment that threatens to “destroy the Einsteinian universe.” Adam Prentiss Rogers, the story’s protagonist, is an “ontologist” working for the International Bureau of the Censor. His mission is to “keep reality as is,” by suppressing any scientific research that might “alter the shape of that reality.” But such research is actually being conducted by the story’s antagonist, Professor Luce. He has invented “a practical device – an actual machine – for the wholesale alteration of incoming sensoria,” the raw material of subjective experience. Once he runs this device, human beings will be bombarded with “novel sensoria” that “can’t be conformed to our present apperception mass.” That is to say, our minds will be traumatically overwhelmed by sensations that we are unable to process.

  What can this mean? Kant famously warns us that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” Luce’s experiment threatens (and intends) to “blind” us, by producing “intuitions” (Kant’s word for sensations) to which our usual concepts cannot be applied. Reality will no longer fit into the shapes that we impose upon it, and through which we are able to parse it. Faced with such disruption, experience as we know it will fall apart. “Instead of a [space-time] continuum, our ‘reality’ would become a disconnected melange of three-dimensional objects. Time, if it existed, wouldn’t bear any relation to spatial things.” The vast majority of humankind will not be able to navigate such a new reality. The only people able to “get through,” to grasp the altered state of the world and function within it, will be “the two or three who understood advanced ontology”: Prentiss, Luce, and perhaps Prentiss’ boss and love interest, the woman known only as E. In a classic display of scientific hubris, familiar from so many science fiction stories, Luce promises that the two or three of them “will be gods,” finally able “to know all things” as they truly are.

  One obvious way to take “The New Reality” is as an allegory of relentless scientific and technological progress. As George Zebrowski puts it, in his general introduction to Harness’ work, the story “takes its strength from the dynamic fact of human scientific development, by which the growth of our knowledge is linked to new ideas and imaginings.” For the last several centuries, new technologies have traumatically overwhelmed us, leaving us numb and alienated – a theme treated by such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan. More specifically, “The New Reality” anticipates what later came to be called future shock: as in the 1970 book of that title by Alvin Toffler, and John Brunner’s 1975 science fiction novel The Shockwave Rider. It is not for nothing that, in his day job, Harness was a patent lawyer; he was well positioned to see how the rapid pace of technological innovation might surpass our ability to adjust to it.

  But “The New Reality” also warns us that the violent change it envisions is not just a matter of “something like the application of the quantum theory and relativity to the production of atomic energy, which of course has changed the shape of civilization.” The disruption goes much further than this. Beyond the pragmatic “application” of scientific theories, we must consider the basic ontology of the scientific process itself. The story anticipates, by more than a decade, Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts in the history of science (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). In the course of what Kuhn calls scientific revolutions, new models of reality are introduced. These new models do not just reflect the accumulation of additional empirical data; they are often flatly incompatible with the prevailing previous ones. The Einsteinian universe is quite different from the Newtonian universe that it replaced. As Zebrowski notes, people have historically found it difficult to accept and adapt to such changes in our world picture as “the dethroning of the Earth as the center of the universe” (Copernicus) and the theory of �
��evolution by natural selection” (Darwin).

  “The New Reality” radicalizes the drama of scientific paradigm change by the simple expedient of taking it naively – which is to say, literally. The story’s basic premise is that our consensus reality is itself merely a historical construct. The physical universe has actually changed over the course of time, in tandem with the development of science. For instance, the story tells us that the world really was flat when people thought it was flat, prior to 500 BC; now it is actually round because our theories tell us that it must be. The “Late Greeks” inferred the spherical shape of the Earth from their observation “that [the] mast of [an] approaching ship appeared first, then [the] prow.” But if “earlier seafaring peoples” like the Minoans never made this observation, it is because there was no such phenomenon for them to observe. We should not think that they failed to notice because “they worked with childish premises and infantile instruments.” Rather, the Minoans were sophisticated in their own way; it is just that the curvature of the Earth didn’t exist yet. In 1000 BC, the mast of a distant ship did not appear any earlier than the prow. Five hundred years later, the Late Greeks observed this phenomenon because their metaphysics required evidence of roundness, which the Minoans’ earlier metaphysics had not.

  Or, to give another example, today it is an established truth that the rocks making up the Earth’s crust are millions or billions of years old. But the story suggests that this was not the case in the seventeenth century, when everyone just knew that the Earth itself was only six thousand years old. At that time, the best scientists “studied chalk, gravel, marble, and even coal, without finding anything inconsistent with results to be expected from the Noachian Flood.” It was only during the course of the nineteenth century that these rocks retrospectively became much older. It’s a bit like the retcon (retroactive continuity) process sometimes found in comics, and in fantasy and science fiction stories. For instance, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the character of Dawn is introduced at the start of the show’s fifth season; but subsequently, everyone in the story remembers her as having been there from the beginning. In a similar way, the nineteenth century needed ancient rocks, because it had invented deep geological time; and so the antiquity of the rocks was established by scientific study.